How Should I Handle Being Rich?
Are you a Christian with strong financial means? If so, how should you live? James has a few ideas.
Would you consider yourself a rich person?
I have yet to have someone say "yes" in response. That's because most people always compare and think Sure, I have some financial means, but nothing like my one friend. My job isn't as great. My pay isn't nearly what I'd like. And my home is much smaller than I'd envisioned.
And by doing so, they fail to consider where we're at in human history. When James was writing, the contrast between the rich and the poor was dramatic. The NIV Application Commentary notes,
About 90 percent of the population of the Roman Empire lived at or below what moderns would consider the poverty level. Except in select urban locations such as Corinth, social climbing in the Roman world was a virtual impossibility.
There was virtually no middle class. You were either rich or poor. While a strong middle-class population exists in the Western world today, a significant global divide persists between the elite and those who have virtually nothing. And while you might not consider yourself to be among the elites of society today, just listen to a few of these current statistics:
- At least 80% of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day.
- 22,000 children die each day due to poverty.
- Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
- Out of the roughly 2.2 billion children living in the world, 1 billion of them live in poverty.
If you make $30,000 per year, you are in the top 1% of earners globally. There's a good chance you are, by definition, rich.
So, What Should You, As a Rich Person, Do?
Often, the political response to wealth inequality has been wealth redistribution. We force the wealthy to give what we believe is acceptable. But the self-sacrificial love Christ calls for is much grander.
Instead of compulsion, he challenges those who have much to give of their blessings to the poor. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig suggests believers in Western Culture should be willing to give upwards of thirty percent of what they have. We should move past whether we tithe 10% on the gross or net of our income and start giving in a way that stretches our faith.
This is challenging. It’s easy to feel we are entitled to all we have. That it’s only because of our hard work that we are where we are today. Truth be told, every blessing we have is a result of God’s goodness in our lives.
